With virtual machine technology, a user can create and run multiple operating environments on a server at the same time. Each operating environment, or virtual machine, requires its own “guest” operating system (OS) and can run software applications independently from the other virtual machines. The VM software provides a layer between the computing, storage, and networking hardware and the software that runs on it.
Virtual machine technology provides many benefits as it can lower information technology (IT) costs through increased efficiency, flexibility and responsiveness. Each virtual machine acts as a separate environment that reduces risks and allows developers to quickly recreate different OS configurations or compare versions of applications designed for different OSs. Additional customer uses for VMs include cloud services, targeted production server consolidation, hosting of legacy applications (older versions), and computer or server backup. A frequent situation that arises in this context that a user often establishes a connection to a VM running in a datacenter, for example, to open a virtual desktop session.